[Illustration: A lone pine on the Indian River]
To know anything at all of the spruces, pines and hemlocks is to love them for the refreshment there is in their living presence, rather than to consider them merely for the timber value. But the point of view differs immensely with one's occupation. I remember finding in the depths of an Alleghany forest a comparatively rare native orchid, then new to me--the round-leaved _or orbicular habenaria_. While I was gloating over it with my camera a gray-haired native of the neighborhood joined me, and, to my surprise, assisted in the gloating--he, too, loved the woods and the plants. Coming a little later to a group of magnificent hemlocks, with great, clean, towering trunks reaching up a hundred feet through the soft maples and yellow birches and beeches which seemed dwarfed by these veterans, I exclaimed in admiration. "Yes," he said, "them's mighty fine hemlocks. I calc'late thet one to the left would bark near five dollars' wuth!" On the rare plant we had joined in esthetic appreciation, but the hemlock was to the old lumberman but a source of tan-bark.
This search for tannin, by the way, is to blame for much wanton destruction. Young hemlocks, from four to six inches in diameter, are felled, stripped of their bark, and left cumbering the ground, to invite fire and to make of the woods an unkempt cemetery. The fall of a tree from natural causes is followed by the interesting and beauty-making process of its mossy decay and return to the forest floor, furnishing in the process nourishment for countless seedlings and plants. A tree felled in maturity under enlightened forest management is all removed for its timber, and leaves the ground clear; but the operations of the bark-hunter leave only hideous destruction and a "slash" that is most difficult to clear in later years.
This same hemlock makes a most impressive forest. To walk among primeval hemlocks brings healing to the mind and peace to the soul, as one realizes fully that "the groves were God's first temples," and that God is close to one in these beneficent solitudes, where petty things must fall away, vexations cease, and man's spiritual nature absorb the message of the forest.